Month: February 2018

Imagine that in your hands you hold an old bow and arrow. It is summer. The sun is rising. You are young and better looking than you are (why not?). All is quiet except for birds singing. You gaze up at distant hills and the last of midnight stars.

You feel like you’re in a movie that only you will see, but that’s not sad. It’s profound. It’s an opportunity for you to enjoy the show.

Wild grass swishes against your legs as you walk into the centre of a meadow lined by trees. The air smells damp. It is cool, not cold. Selecting a spot from which to launch, you position an arrow and raise the bow. A lively tune from your soundtrack is playing. Tension builds. Aiming high, you hope to hell no one gets killed.In this imagining where you are better looking than you are, the arrow…

(hans-david.blogspot.com) Although opposition to the state and all forms of authority had a strong voice among the early feminists of the 19th century, the more recent feminist movement which began in the 1960’s was founded upon anarchist practice. This is where the term anarcha-feminism came from, referring to women anarchists who act within the larger feminist and anarchist movements to remind them of their principles.

Anarchism and feminism have always been closely linked. Many outstanding feminists have also been anarchists, including the pioneering Mary Wollstonecraft (author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman), the Communard Louise Michel, Voltairine de Cleyre and the tireless champion of women’s freedom, Emma Goldman (see her famous essays “The Traffic in Women”, “Woman Suffrage”, “The Tragedy of Woman’s Emancipation”, “Marriage and Love” and “Victims of Morality”, for example). Freedom, the world’s oldest anarchist newspaper, was founded by Charlotte Wilson in 1886. In…

In 2012 Rebecca Sommer founded the refugee aid association Arbeitsgruppe Flucht + Menschen-Rechte (AG F+M) [Working Group Asylum + Human Rights]. At the end of 2015, this artist, photographer and journalist and documentary maker applauded Angela Merkel’s decision to open German’s borders to the “refugees” who had been blocked in Hungary, despite the vacuum effect this would create. “At that time I wanted to help everyone and truly believed that all these people were fleeing hell and were in a state of complete distress,” the German activist explained in an article published by the conservative Polish weekly Do Rzeczy on 15 January, discussing how she woke up to reality.

In 2015, her NGO had almost 300 volunteers who were giving German courses to the new arrivals.

…”I thought their medieval view was going to change with time…but after having seen these situations occur repeatedly and observing what was happening…

“The import is not the kind of work woman does, but rather the quality of the work she furnishes... Her development, her freedom, her independence, must come from and through herself. First, by asserting herself as a personality, and not as a sex commodity. Second, by refusing the right to anyone over her body;... Continue Reading →